Thomas Kurian To Replace Diane Greene as Google Cloud CEO

In a blog post, Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene announced her plans to step down. She added, too, that she will help to make the transition for the new CEO as easy as possible. But who is this new CEO? That would be former Oracle executive Thomas Kurian, who will take this top spot sometime early next year.

Now, Greene has not been CEO of Google Cloud for very long. She actually took over this position when Google scooped up the startup she was running, Bebop, just three years ago. At the time, the company held the belief that they needed someone who had strong enterprise background to run the unit and Greene, with a proven track record from launching VMware, would definitely be a contender with the right credentials.

In her blog post about the decision, she comments that Google Cloud had achieved many things in that short time frame while she has been CEO. For example, when she began in the position, Google Cloud had only two significant customers a handful of startups; but upon her retirement, Google Cloud has several major Fortune 1000 enterprise companies as customers.

In addition, Google Cloud had a bit of a disjointed catalog in terms of cloud services when Greene started three years ago. Of course, one of her responsibilities would be to align all of these under a single umbrella. This umbrella, then, brings together sales and marketing for Google Cloud as well as the whole of the Google Cloud Platform infrastructure (GCP), and Google Apps/G Suite apps, all of which are now simply housed in “Google Cloud.”

Looking at Kurian, now, we know that he recently stepped down from his president of product development role at Oracle just a few months ago. In early September he announced his decision to take a leave of absence before the exit would become permanent.

He brings with him a lot of the same things that Greene offered, mostly enterprise experience. This is certainly going to be necessary as Google is still vying for market share in the Cloud Computing world against industry stalwarts Microsoft and Amazon. Through Greene’s tenure, Google had only managed to consistently hold 10 percent market share.